”Finally, I would like to strike a blow for making a poem of the Finnish poet Pentti Saarkoski [se också här om Saarkoski] this movement’s poem. It is called ‘I will not forgive them’ and goes like this:

I will not forgive them, for they know very well what they are doing. They wanted me to write songs for them about the wind, about the bird and the tree, beautiful songs that they later at night could read to their souls’ delight, to forget what they have been doing during the day: poisoned the wind, killed the bird and the tree.

I will not leave them in peace. I do not speak incomprehensible to satisfy them, I am not waiting until the prison they are building is finished around me, I do not believe in their knowledge, not in their money, not in their God and not in their victory.

They brought me up, they wanted to tame me and make me a humble servant, and now they are full of hatred, they see that their efforts were in vain, I became their opponent, and all their teaching now turns against themselves.

I give them no calm until they are deprived of the power they control people by, they, who are not even able to control things any longer. They are businessmen, and businessmen should always be paid more than they themselves pay, but I pay them with their own coin, they have poisoned the wind, killed the bird and the tree, all my joy.

They own the earth and they own the sky, but the earth and the sky are not on their side. This they know, therefore they arm for war, they spoil the earth and sky rather than giving up their wealth.

I do not believe in their victory, because they are ever fewer, ever more are those who are not just waiting, we are ever more, in their narrow cities, in their schools, in their factories, are we ever more, more and more do they need us, less and less do we need them. We have carried them on our shoulders long enough and endured their incompetent leadership, their miserable household, their false teaching.

We carry them on our shoulders, we only need to straighten our backs and they will fall, we only need to open our mouths and they become silent, the bird sings again, the tree turns green.

———-

Let us get started, my friends. It is a long march we have started. However, it is not late in the world, it is still early. We have only just started. Good luck!”

* Från slutet av artikeln ”Brutaliseringen av arbetet”:

“The new, neo-liberal power relations have led to a comprehensive setback for the trade union and the labour movement. In spite of economic growth, working conditions are being brutalised, trade union rights and social welfare are being undermined, the really existing welfare economy is breaking down. Now, more than 50 years after the development of the social pact and the welfare economy, we have to admit that the capitalists succeeded in their strategy. By giving in to many of the demands of a well-organised working class, they succeeded in deradicalising and depoliticising the labour movement, but without giving up the basics of their economic power. It is possibly a hard judgement for many, but I think that we have to admit that the ideology of the social pact has proved wrong. Nothing less than that!

In the trade union and the labour movement we have to ask ourselves – why did this policy fail? What went wrong? Part of the answer is that the social pact itself was not a stable situation, it was a compromise in a specific historic situation. Something which could have been a successful, short term, tactical compromise, gradually became the final aim of the labour movement. Since the social democratic parties became the bearers of the policy of the historic compromise between labour and capital, the breakdown of the social pact explains why these parties have been and still are in a state of deep ideological crisis.

In this situation, a great part of the workers feels betrayed by their political representatives – they ‘do not any longer recognise their (social democratic) party.’ On the contrary, many workers increasingly identify the labour parties as well as the trade union movement as parts of the ‘establishment’ – which has distanced themselves from the reality and the daily lives of ordinary people. It has become the role of the right wing populist parties to exploit this discontent, people’s political confusion and increasing feeling of powerlessness. These parties offer simple solutions, criticism of the traditional politicians and even a political perverted form of system-criticism with a strong appeal to alienated and excluded people who feel more and more powerless in a society with ever more self-confident and self-sufficient economic and political elites that are increasingly growing together. The right wing populist parties do not, however, mobilise people against the social forces behind the brutalisation of work and the attacks on the welfare state, they channelise workers’ discontent against other social groups – such as ”those who take our jobs” (immigrants), ‘those who are a burden on society’ (lonely parents, people on welfare) and ‘those who impose ever higher taxes’ or ‘pursuit their own privileges’ (politicians).

This is not a necessary development, of course, it is the result of a historic specific development which is possible both to analyse and to understand. When workers are being attacked, oppressed and humiliated, their anger is being directed against the existing society, and they are starting to look for alternatives, for more radical solutions. Again, if the only ‘credible’ alternative on the market is right wing populism, then many depoliticised workers tend to follow that path. If there are ‘credible’ left wing alternatives, we can experience a political polarisation, as has been the case in Norway over the last couple of years. Here we have seen a considerable growth of the Socialist Left Party as well as the Progressive Party (the right wing populist party), while the Social Democratic Party has lost a great part of its support among workers.

Whether we like it or not, reality is that we are moving from consensus to confrontation. We had rather be prepared. The social forces which want to defend decent working conditions and public welfare will therefore have to meet the confronting attacks from the state and capitalist forces with a counter offensive. Great parts of the trade union movement have not yet realised this. Demands for a new class compromise, obviously with a nostalgic hope that the social peace and the gradual improvement of social conditions of the 1960s should be restored, do not have any realistic basis under the current balance of power. The only way to meet this political challenge in the labour movement is therefore through a more radical and system-critical policy, which is able to analyse and explain the breakdown of the social pact and the fundamental social contradictions in our societies – as well as to develop a strategy in which people’s discontent and anger are taken seriously, politicised and turned into a collective struggle for democracy, solidarity and social welfare. In this struggle, the trade union movement should also build alliances with the new global movement for solidarity and justice, the social forum movement, which has developed so rapidly over the last few years. Such alliances could contribute to the revitalisation and radicalisation of the trade union movement, which is necessary if we really want to contain the attraction of right wing populism in the working class.”